BOLZANO (ITALY)
Politiko [Manila, Philippines]
January 21, 2025
[See also the full text of the report in German and Italian.]
An inquiry into sexual abuse by priests in one northern Italian diocese Monday reported 60 cases since 1964, in what it called the Catholic-majority country’s first independent study into the problem.
The diocese of Bolzano-Bressanone, covering the northeastern region of South Tyrol, had commissioned a Munich-based law firm to carry out the investigation for the period 1964-2023, whose findings were published Monday.
Westpfahl Spilker Wastl said it was the first study carried out within the Italian Episcopal Conference “to reconstruct and examine in a completely independent manner the episodes of sexual abuse”.
“Every case is one too many,” said the dioese’s Bishop Ivo Muser, adding that the suffering of victims “should fill us with shame and challenge us to look deeply”.
The still-unfolding international scandal of paedophile priests within the Catholic Church has spurred independent inquiries across the United States, Europe and Australia, exposing the scale of the problem.
But Italy — home to the Vatican, which still carries huge influence within society — has not undertaken similar work.
The lawyers’ 631-page report for Bolzano-Bressanone — based on about 1,000 consulted files, as well as interviews — found that from 1964 when the diocese was created, 59 people were the victims of abuse, “mostly probable or proven”.
It remained “still unclear” for another 16 people, it found.
The perpetrators were 29 clerics whose allegations against them were “demonstrably true or highly probable”, involved in 67 cases of sexual assault, found the report.
Victims of the abuse were 51 percent female, according to the findings.
The report cited “systemic deficiencies” within the Catholic Church as a whole that contributed to the sexual abuse, including a lack of strategies in dealing with sexuality, “male alliance systems”, fear of harming the Church, and taboos.
“This data clearly shows that in the past, for all German-speaking areas until 2010, the handling of sexual abuse cases was a general and highly systemic failure” with Church leaders who failed to “grasp the pain suffered by the people involved”.
One priest cited in the report was only removed from his office in 2010 even though his sexual abuse of girls as young as seven were first brought to light in the 1960s, and repeatedly thereafter.
According to the report, the diocese after 2010 underwent a change, with the hierarchy exhibiting “greater willingness to admit their own mistakes”.
The report cited “the first sincere efforts aimed at shedding light on what, clearly and unequivocally, can be defined as the ‘scandal of abuse’ and, above all, the will to offer help to the people involved”.
Westpfahl Spilker Wastl carried out a similar study for the Munich-Freising archdiocese published in 2022, in which it found at least 497 children had been abused between 1945 and 2019.